Wednesday, January 30, 2008

So, now that we have this fancy calcumalator here, lets get to using it. Today I want to look at two subjects: Swipe vs. Lacerate for single target tanking, and the effectiveness and efficiency of Maul. We'll get to other topics, like the value of hit, expertise rating, and how to use the calculator to make a good offtanking threat rotation, in a future post.

The Surprisingly High Efficiency of Maul

I'm going to start with the second subject first, because it really surprised me when I actually started looking at the numbers. Using the numbers from yesterday, Maul is only about 10% less rage efficient than lacerate, coming in at about 27.2 threat/rage compared to lacerate's 31.4. The lower your AP and crit are, the more rage efficient Maul is, though even if we reduce ourselves to 1500 AP and 20% crit, Maul is only AS efficient as Lacerate. The lesson here is simple: Dont worry TOO much if you Maul one too many times, and because of it miss a lacerate. You're not losing that much threat. . . unless you also miss a mangle, which has an INCREDIBLE amount of rage efficiency!

Now, you might be wondering, how does Maul have negative scaling? Well. . . it actually has no scaling whatsoever (Save for a little bit of scaling with crit, I suppose). The reason Maul's numbers look worse and worse as we get better threat generation stats is actually due to the scaling of autoattack. The better our autoattack damage, the more rage our autoattacks generate. . . and since I'm factoring the loss of an autoattack into Maul's rage cost, Maul actually costs MORE rage the better your gear is.

Swipe Vs. Lacerate: the Breakpoints

Some of you may not realize this, but there comes a point where Swipe actually pulls ahead of lacerate for single-target threat generation. The question is, where does this breakpoint lie. Well, funny thing, its actually pretty simple to extract the data, but it relies on two factors: your crit, and your attack power. I'm going to assume that hit is meaningless here (since both attacks suffer the same miss rate). I'm also discounting the lacerate bleed effect for now, basically assuming we're comparing Mangle->Lacerate x3 to Mangle->Lacerate->Swipe x2, just for ease of calculation. And I'm going to look at 2 values for mob mitigation; 30% because thats what I used as the default in the calculator (And coincidentally, is about what Void Reaver sits at after raid debuffs, that being a very threat-sensitive fight), and 20% (Which will be the new default, based on the research done on boss armor at Elitist Jerks, and assuming full raid debuffs and average armor, more or less). The results, which are also now saved in the calculator, are as follows:

To read this table, just find the row that most closely resembles your Attack power, and the colum that resembles how you want to compare swipe and lacerate (20% or 30% mitigation, Threat/swing or Threat/rage). Where they cross is a crit value. If you have more than that amount of crit, Swipe outperforms lacerate. Less than that amount of crit, and lacerate pulls ahead. So, for example, I figure that, raid buffed, I have about 2600 AP and 35% crit. Looking across the 2600 AP row, I see that, believe it or not, there is only one occasion where swipe DOESN'T outperform lacerate on a single target: Threat/Rage on a target with 30% armor.

What this says to me (and yes, this actually is news to me) is that I need to switch my tanking rotation to more heavily use swipe, except for when I'm tanking on the Lootreaver fight AND am threat limited (Not actually VR's target). Looks like its time to start using that Mangle->Lacerate->Swipe x2 rotation I mentioned earlier!